Song of Coal
by Josie Quinn

She was a servant of death. Her charcoal beak pulled apart corpses, freeing their souls back into the world around them. Into the soil, the trees, and a small piece into her own wings. This was the magic her mother gave her as a fledgling. The magic of her mother and her mother’s mother. All of them felt the song of the dead for the earth, the cry of souls wishing return, return, return.

She needed no name to refer to herself. She was herself and all the world around her was not her, but was her kin, and her fate.

She recognized the redolence of death on the rocks the humans dug up. It sang to her and called her closer, closer. Called her to follow when they loaded it onto the backs of great beasts that belched a sour smell. That, too, was full of death. A death somehow changed.

The great beasts ran for miles to reach one of the square nests of the humans. As she approached, the air became clogged and thick. Flying became harder, breathing, a labor. She was forced to land on a tall branchless tree to watch the lumbering beasts run their last stretch.

She took in another breath, held it in her lungs, tasted the burnt remains of death. She knew this. The humans’ actions, their magics. This was the magic she had known all her life, but twisted and warped and confused. The humans were freeing the souls of the rocks. Of the dead left so long to rest. They were taking too much of the souls for their own wings. They weren’t returning it to the Earth.

But she knew it was wrong, wrong, wrong. She felt the burning. Watched the thick clouds drift away from the earth that it so longed for. The souls’ anger reverberated in the smoke. The malevolence that haunted this nest, choking it with sorrow of a rightful rest disturbed. The rumbling of another great beast startled her from her perch. She took to her wings, swooping close to its hollow back full of the death rocks. There above them she felt tiny. Her wings spanned only a fraction of the beast’s back, piled full with rocks that stretched deep down into its stomach. She was too small to free all the souls, she heard them crying to her. She took one, small enough to fit in her beak, and veered away into the woods.

The death rock was too hard to pull apart, so she brought it to the soft needles under a pine tree. She listened to it, it’s dark and dusty facets black as her own feathers. She buried it again in the soil where it longed to be. And she cried its own song back as she did: Return, return, return.

~

Josie Quinn is an ESF sophomore in environmental science with a passion for storytelling. She’s the vice president of the poetry club and loves creating art with language.

Featured image: Photo by Charl van Rooy, 2023.

Author’s note: The very nature of the environment is change and transition. Every organism has an impact, a way they fundamentally transform something around them, but in our increasingly advanced world we must ask ourselves the scale of our (human) impacts. This piece is an examination of that through an outside lens, a distortion intended to prompt examination and introspection.